How AWS Plans to Boost Sustainability with Orbital Materials
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has entered into a multi-year partnership with Orbital Materials (Orbital) to harness AI and develop new data centre decarbonisation and efficiency technologies.
Orbital is a company that uses its proprietary AI platform to incubate new advanced materials and climate technologies. It is using this to design, synthesise and test new technologies and advanced materials for data centre-integrated carbon removal and cooling technology.
As part of this collaboration, both companies will evaluate the scalability and performance of these new technologies in removing carbon and increasing efficiency.
“Our partnership with AWS will accelerate the deployment of our advanced technologies for data centre decarbonisation and efficiency,” explains Jonathan Godwin, CEO of Orbital Materials. “Working with the market-leading AWS team will accelerate our development of products in cooling, water utilisation and carbon removal.”
Accelerating advanced data centre technologies
First launched at the end of 2022, Orbital is committed to utilising the power of AI to accelerate the discovery, testing and deployment of advanced materials and climate technologies.
The company views traditional methods of discovering these technologies as too time-consuming, given that they have long relied on trial and error processes in the lab. This means that years of experimentation could take place before success is achieved.
In response, by leveraging its proprietary AI technologies at its advanced materials research and development (R&D) facility in Princeton, Orbital is able to design and deploy end-to-end climate technologies faster than possible with just human input alone.
This type of generative AI (Gen AI) design enables the organisation to radically improve the speed and efficacy of materials discovery and new technology commercialisation.
Its first product, a carbon removal technology utilising a proprietary active material, has achieved a 10x improvement in its material’s performance through the use of its AI platform since being established in the first quarter of 2024. This is an order of magnitude faster than traditional development and breaking new ground in carbon removal efficacy.
Orbital is also planning to deploy and test its carbon removable technology by the end of 2025.
Utilising an AI leader
Orbital’s market-leading open-source AI model for simulating advanced materials, ‘Orb’, will be generally available for AWS customers via Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and AWS Marketplace. This marks the first AI-for-materials model to be on AWS platforms.
Additionally, Orb will enable AWS customers working on advanced materials and technologies, like semiconductors, batteries and electronics, to access market-leading accelerated R&D within a secure and unified cloud environment.
As part of the collaboration, Orbital will pre-train and fine-tune its frontier foundation models on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a purpose-built infrastructure for distributed training at scale.
It will also evaluate deploying AWS’s custom silicon, Trainium, to improve cost performance for its Deep Learning workloads.
As a world leader, AWS is expanding its AI and HPC capabilities for the next era of data centre development. Significantly, in December 2024, it announced plans to upgrade its infrastructure to deliver 12% more compute power.
Announced at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the development will focus on liquid cooling and power density improvements for AI workloads, as the technology continues to dominate the data centre industry.
“AWS looks forward to collaborating with Orbital and their mission to drive data centre decarbonisation and efficiency. Through Amazon SageMaker HyperPod and AWS Trainium, we can accelerate the development of breakthrough sustainability technologies,” says Howard Gefen, General Manager of AWS Energy & Utilities.
“By integrating Orb with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and AWS Marketplace, we will enable sustainable innovation more widely.”
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